Story By: - Paul Levinson, author of “New New Media” and Fordham University professor
“We’ve seen a huge evolution in the purposes that flash mobs have been used,” she says. “Some can be used for progressive purposes, but they can also be used for rioting, hooliganism or gang activity.”
Flash mobs set up via Twitter and Facebook have appeared at BP gas stations to demonstrate against the company’s handling of the Gulf oil spill. In Switzerland, Greenpeace organized a flash mob in which more than 100 people pretended to drop dead to protest nuclear power.
Social media tools also were linked to riots this summer in Vancouver and across Britain.
Behind The Masks
Anonymous claimed responsibility last month for hacking into some 70 law enforcement websites, garnering “a massive amount of confidential information,” including emails and credit card numbers. The move was in retaliation for the FBI arrest of 16 suspects for their alleged involvement in the PayPal denial of service attack.
Gabriella Coleman, a professor of media, culture and communications at New York University, says Anonymous at first used Internet forums to organize, and has since expanded its reach through social media sites.
2003: Anonymous originates on Internet forums such as 4chan and Internet Relay Chat as a loosely affiliated group of hackers with little or no defined social agenda.
2006: The loosely organized collective carries out some of its first major acts of online mayhem, including a distributed denial of service [DDoS] attack that disables the website of radio host Hal Turner, known for racially charged remarks.
2008: Anonymous launches Project Chanology in retaliation for the Church of Scientology’s demand that YouTube remove a church video interview of actor and Scientologist Tom Cruise. In addition to launching DDoS attacks against Scientology websites, followers wearing masks of Guy Fawkes turn out for street protests at church centers mostly in the U.S. and Europe.
2009: Following the Iranian presidential election, with its widespread accusations of vote-rigging, Anonymous launches a website supporting the Iranian Green Party with the aim of skirting official censorship.
2010: Anonymous launches a DDoS attack against Australian government websites in retaliation for Canberra’s plan to implement anti-child-pornography Internet filtering software.
The group launches Operation Payback in support of WikiLeaks and its embattled chief, Julian Assange. Denial of service attacks hit the websites of PayPal, MasterCard, Visa and Amazon.
2011: Anonymous launches various operations in support of the Arab Spring, including denial of service attacks and hacks against government websites in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Jordon and Morocco.
Operation BART draws followers into San Francisco train stations to protest the Bay Area Rapid Transit system’s decision to shut down cell phone service on the trains in an effort to quash an anti-police protest. Anonymous also hacks a BART website.
— Scott Neuman
It has also spawned splinter groups such as Lulz Security (recently disbanded) and the Anti-Security Movement (still active) that have gone on to launch their own hacktivist attacks.
As the group’s name suggests, anonymity â particularly the kind that can be found in cyberspace â is important to many of its followers. Giving it up doesn’t come lightly. Members typically show up at protests sporting a mask in the likeness of the 16th century English radical Guy Fawkes.
Many Anons are in their 20s and 30s, but a few are in their 60s â the “grandfathers” of the movement, says Coleman, who is writing a book on Anonymous.
“There is a sort of across-the-board free-speech sensibility that many Anons share, which many geeks and hackers share,” she says. “The libertarian label, though, ends at, ‘We believe in free speech.’ “
While free speech and anti-censorship is a key part of the group’s ideology, there’s also a definite leftist and anti-capitalist strain in some Anons. “Beyond that,” she says, “it’s a pretty diverse lot.”
An Imperfect Union
Mark Rasch, who led the Justice Department’s computer crime efforts for eight years, says Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites have “created this online community that didn’t exist before.”
Now, he says, “a relatively small group of people can do a lot of damage to a large and sophisticated organization.”
But neither Rasch nor Fordham University’s Levinson thinks flesh-and-blood protests will eclipse online attacks among hacktivist groups.
“Why protest [in public] and risk getting caught if I can do it from my living room?” says Rasch, who is now director of cybersecurity and privacy at the Falls Church, Va.-based consulting firm CSC. And Levinson points out that “it’s easy to do things online; it’s hard to get people into the same physical space for a protest.”
Molnar of the New School acknowledges that online activists tend to be less cohesive than social protesters in the past, who typically met face to face and knew more about one another.
“The threshold for participation is much lower because of the nature of the new technology,” Molnar says. “You do not have to be integrated into a closely knit network or even a formal organization, so these organizations tend to be much looser, much more diffuse, and they often mobilize a lot of strangers that are not strongly involved in the movement itself, unlike the student movements in the 1960s.”
“I think the bigger challenge is to keep these people engaged over the long run,” she says.
Online activist groups may disintegrate more easily, but Molnar says that “in particularly important moments, they might be able to make a bigger splash than a formal organization that has a much longer shelf life.”